To date, carriers have been able to invest in 4G and LTE networks to boost network capacity in hotspots. However, these solutions are reaching their limit. LTE and 4G are also showing that the perceived capacity of added bandwidth is causing users and applications to increase usage and data consumption. In the long run, it might add to the congestion problem rather than help.
While mobile or broadband networks may be designed for high-throughput of large amounts of data, they were not necessarily tailored to service the mobile applications that require frequent, low-throughput requests of small amounts of data. Existing networks also do not take into account different types of mobile traffic and priorities of the different types of traffic, for example, from a user experience perspective.
The issue has been exacerbated by the rapid increase of the popularity of applications with network-initiated functionalities, such as social media applications, cloud-based mobile clients, email clients, news feeds, status updates, multimedia content sharing, mobile games and other mobile applications, etc. Furthermore, the problem with constant polling is that mobile phones also rely on signaling to send and receive calls and SMS messages and basic mobile functions are forced to take a backseat to applications and other mobile clients.